"While Mr. Ignatieff claims that Canada would pay no penalty, the Memorandum of Understanding our country signed with its NATO allies clearly imposes cancellation costs in the neighbourhood of $551-million.

Moreover, Watt said Canada would still be on the hook for roughly $500 million, its portion of the original industrial benefits agreement that the Liberals signed in 1997, when they first committed the country to the Joint Strike Fighter program.

MOUs are a common feature of international relations for the past 50 years.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mooks

According to your profile Stampeder, you live in North Delta; the JSF is bringing hundreds of millions of dollars to your local economy

Patronizing us will get you nowhere. Also, Avcorp will make those parts whether Canada buys them or not, so your point about supporting the deal for the benefit of the local economy isn't particularly valid. The enormous, and escalating, cost of F-35 jets facing governments is the biggest threat to Avcorp jobs as potential customers re-evaluate and possibly dump their F-35 plans.

So far your interventions in this thread seem to not reveal any new synthesis of F-35 deal information but rather only muddy waters already well churned and settled. This is a very bad deal for Canada for the catalogue of valid reasons already listed here by many people, many times over.

Thanks for the links Mooks. I know why I was not able to find anything. In one article they say around 500 million not 551. Also, in both Ignatieff said there was no penalty. It seems the politicians on both sides know something we don't.

An excellent summary by Foreign Policy, and it really forces the issue that our government had better quickly entertain options to the F-35 in an open, transparent, honest fashion.

As I've indicated here already, the nation of India is already benefiting from real technology exchange and advanced aircraft manufacturing expertise as a result of their purchase in 2011 of the Dassault Rafale over all other competitors. It is logical to believe that France would extend it's NATO ally, Canada, even greater access to the underlying technology and benefits, but of course this would also need to be acquired in an honest and open process so that any other competitor could also offer such benefits.

So, anyone suggesting that Canada's economic and technological standing will suffer with the ending of the F-35 involvement is not telling us the complete story.

Mooks, I didn't know the taxpayer was on the hook for half a billion bucks, thanks to semantics of MOU v. contract. Your explanation is enlightening yet even more infuriating. Moreover, the appeal to fear, the idea Stampeder should just like it because his community would otherwise suffer, seems ridiculous and beneath intellectual discourse. Let's examine the merits of the plane, without threatening Stampeder's neighbours with unemployment or at best a smaller bonus.

Half a billion does sound more significant than 5 hundred million, doesn't it?

Some touters of the F-35 have crowed about how much of the F-22's design heritage imbues the new fighter's design. Others have suggested that Canada should demand the F-22 instead. Now that the F-22 has been in service, and after it's purchase quantities had been dramatically cut, and then most especially after terrible problems resulted in the complete grounding of the entire F-22 fleet, sensible people in the U.S. are saying enough is enough:

So, with a heritage like that, it is easy to see that the F-35 program is blundering along in almost exactly the same fashion. Given that the same players, same ideas, and same thinking are going into the two projects, the result cannot be much different: wastage.

They're not totally abandoning it, as I understand, they'll just move to an evaluation of all the alternatives. If the F-35 ends up being the winner in the end, that's great, I just didn't like how they stacked the deck to make it the only choice.

What pains me is that the Cons will probably try to spin this as some sort of victory for their fiscal management prowess, and too many people will eat it up. "We knew costs were ballooning out of control, so took bold action to ensure Canadian taxpayers weren't left on the hook!"

You may be right but if they are balking at the price tag now, in a year it will only be higher. Plus the public will be expecting some fresh ideas. Not the same old rhetoric. Lawson seems to understand that.

I don't know if we're all balking at the price tag or that the price tag is more than double what they tried to claim. Personally, I don't mind paying an expensive price if the plane is the right one for the job. It's certainly far from clear that's the case, however.

I saw a commenter on the Star website claiming that the F-35 thing is the Liberals fault, which is a stretch. Apparently it was the Cons plan all along to gracefully back out of the deal. If those are the talking points they're going with, then that is not going to fool anyone.

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